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To be honest: I’m lazy and I have a wife and two kids. Therefore I have to minimize the costs of my lab. I have a physical lab at the office and some VMs running on Microsoft Azure. Azure is nice, because I only have to pay what I really use. And because I’m only paying the actual use, I start the VMs only when I need them. Inspired by this very handy Azure VM wakeup & shutdown script, I decided to write my own script (yes, I invented a wheel again…). Very simple, nothing fancy. Feel free to use and modify the script according to your needs.

Building networks in the cloud is sometimes hard to understand. A common mistake is to believe that all VMs can talk to another, regardless of the owner, and that all VMs are available over the internet.

Some basics about Cloud Service Endpoints and Virtual Networks

When we talk about Microsoft Azure, a Cloud Service Endpoint is the easiest way to access one or multiple VMs. A Cloud Service contains resources, like VMs, and it’s acting as a communication and security boundary. All VMs that use the same Cloud Service get their IPs via DHCP and share the same private IP address range. The VMs can communicate directly to each other. To access these VMs over the internet, a Cloud Service Endpoint is used. Each Cloud Service has a internet addressable virtual IP address assigned. And that’s the Cloud Service Endpoint. With PAT, ports for RDP or PowerShell are forwarded to the VMs by default. If you deploy a webserver and an application server, both can be provisioned to the same Cloud Service and therefore, they share the same Cloud Service Endpoint. But you can only forward http traffic to the webserver. Therefore only the webserver is available over the internet, not the application server.

DataCore describes in their Host Configuration Guide for VMware ESXi some settings that must be adjusted before storage from DataCore SANsymphony-V storage servers will be assigned to the ESXi hosts. Today, for ESXi 5.x and 6.0, you have to add a custom rule and adjust the advanced setting DiskMaxIOSize. For ESX(i) 4 more parameters had to be adjusted. But I will focus on  ESXi 5.x and 6.0. You need to adjust these settings for each host that should get storage mapped from a DataCore storage server. If you have more then one host, you may have the wish to automate the necessary steps. The check the current value of DiskMaxIOSize, you can use this lines of PowerCLI code.

When you install DataCore SANsymphony-V (SSV), you will be asked during the setup to allow the installation of some special drivers. DataCore SANSymphony-V needs this drivers to act as a storage target for hosts and other storage servers. Usually you have three different port roles in a DataCore SSV setup:

• Frontend Ports (FE)
• Mirror Ports (MR)
• Backend Ports (BE)

Frontend (FE) ports act only in target-only mode. These ports will be disabled, if you stop a DataCore storage server. Mirror (MR) ports (can) act as target AND initiator. You can set (if you like) a mirror port to a specific mode (target or initiator), but I wouldn’t recomment this. Theoretically you can set one MR port to act as initiator, and a second to target-only mode. If the port is set to target-only, the port is also stopped when the DataCore storage server is stopped. A backend (BE) port acts as initiator for backend storage. Usually the FE ports act as target-only, the MR as target/ initiator and the BE ports as initiator-only. If you use local storage (or SAS connected), there will be no BE ports.

One of my longtime DataCore customers has started a project to replace their current DataCore storage servers and backend storage with new hardware. In opposite of the current setup, the newly installed backend storage is now FC-attached. The customer has selected Nexsan E-Series E32V, E32XV and E48V storage systems in combination with DataCore SANsymphony-V10.

Who is Nexsan?

The question should be: Who is Imation? Nexsan was founded in 1999 in Derby, England, but was aquired by Imation in December 2012. Since December 2012, Nexsan is one of Imations brands and offers, as a storage-only company, three different product lines: Assureon Secure Storage, E-Series High Density Storage and NST Hybrid Storage.

Since monday I’m helping a customer to put two HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200c into operation. Both StoreServs came factory-installed with 3PAR OS 3.2.1 MU3, which is available since July 2015. Usually, the first thing you do is to deploy the 3PAR Service Processor (SP). These days this is (in most cases) a Virtual Service Processor (VSP). The SP is used to initialize the storage system. Later, the SP reports to HP and it’s used for maintenance tasks like shutdown the StoreServ, install updates and patches. There are only a few cases in which you start the Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) procedure of the StoreServ without having a VSP. I deployed two (one VSP for each StoreServ) VSPs, started the Service Processor Setup Wizard, entered the StoreServ serial number and got this message:

This issue is described in KB2971270 and is fixed in CU6.

I ran a couple of times in this error. After applying changes to SSL certificates (add, replace or delete a SSL certificate) and rebooting the server, the event log is flooded with events from source “HttpEvent” and event id 15021. The message says:

An error occurred while using SSL configuration for endpoint 0.0.0.0:444. The error status code is contained within the returned data.

Last sunday a customer suffered a power outage for a few hours. Unfortunately the DataCore Storage Server in the affected datacenter weren’t shutdown and therefore it crashed. After the power was back, the Storage Server was started and the recoveries for the mirrored virtual disks started. Hours later, three mirrored virtual disks were still running full recoveries and the recovery for each of them failed repeatedly.

Last week I got a call from a customer. The customer has tried to deploy new Citrix XenApp servers, and because the VMware template was a bit outdated, he tried to clone a provisioned and running Citrix XenApp VM. During this, the customer applied a guest customization specification to customize the guest OS (IP address, hostname etc). Until this point everything was fine. But after the clone process, the guest customization started, but never finished.

PernixData is one of the presenting sponsors at the Virtualization Field Day 5 (VFD5). One of the four key announcements is FVP Freedom.

FVP Freedom will be available in the Fall of 2015 and it’s a completely free version of PernixData FVP. Of course, the functionality is limited. FVP Freedom will only support a single cluster, but with an unlimited number of VMs. Instead of SSDs, FVP Freedom will support up to 128 GB of DFTM (Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory) per cluster. FVP Freedomm will be completely community supported.